


Marion Raven Gets a Pair Affair

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 16:57:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2780732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He’s some diplomat’s kid, that’s what I heard. Has a heart condition. Should be a cakewalk - just sit on him until the summit is over, alright? And try not to screw it up.”</p>
<p>He’s roughly her height, roughly her coloring, all skinny limbs and rebellious floppy hair. If Marion were a smidge less vain she might call him roughly as handsome as herself as well. As it stands, she contents herself with admitting that his photograph does him very little justice, and the live thing is indeed quite a picture.</p>
<p>"Marion Raven," she introduces herself. "UNCLE, New York."</p>
<p>(<i>Marion Raven, UNCLE agent, is tasked with protecting one Illya Kuryakin. Nothing is as it seems, however, and with the help of a real estate agent named Napoleon Solo, things shift irreversibly away from normal. </i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marion Raven Gets a Pair Affair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurose8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurose8/gifts).



> For laurose8, who wished for an AU where Marion Raven, not Illya, was the UNCLE agent. It was way too fun to write, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. I wish I could have given it better words, but the ones on the page will have to do.
> 
> Thanks to Sarcasticsra for the rush beta job. <3

“He’s some diplomat’s kid, that’s what I heard. Has a heart condition. Should be a cakewalk - just sit on him until the summit is over, alright? And try not to screw it up.”

Marion doesn’t like Ruthers. He’s boorish and patronizing on his good days, which are few and far between. On his bad days, like today, it's more than half tempting to walk away from UNCLE entirely. He’s her temporary partner. Her latest in a long string of temporary partners. For some reason they keep running out on her. Or they’re like Ruthers, and she wishes they would.

“No backup?” It’s a reasonable question, she thinks, although Ruthers’ laugh indicates she’s alone in that opinion. She’s sitting next to Ruthers’ bulk in the back of a surveillance van that will be traveling on without her to the truly dangerous job of minding the diplomats themselves, not their progeny. Not that she minds being passed over for that assignment. Despite her career as a field agent in UNCLE, she’s not much of one for danger. She prefers to work cleverly and stay out of rifle sights. Ruthers thinks her a coward.

“Afraid of the dark, darling?” He says it around a half chewed cigar, and Marion nearly rolls her eyes at the American gangster image he is so obviously trying to cultivate.

She stands stiffly and opens the van’s sliding door. The rush of cold air hits her like home, and she enjoys the shiver it sends through Ruthers, who hails from Texas rather than the bitter winds of west England. “I’ll just go meet our boy, then.”

“You do that, sweetheart. I’ve heard he’s a doozey. Not even the Russians like him,” he says, and he laughs in that blathering way that shakes the walls of his ribcage with false mirth. “Do me a favor: stay in for the night. Eat some chocolate with the boy. I don’t know, maybe you’ll fall in love.”

Ruthers squeals the tires of the van as he pulls away from the curb. As soon as he’s out of sight Marion allows herself ten seconds of childish behavior (after all, a woman can’t be a lady all the time, or she’ll go mad) in which she stomps her feet, musses her hair, and bites out a curse word. Then she takes a deep breath of the cold air that tastes like Bristol in March and climbs the steps of the Manhattan apartment leased to one Illya Kuryakin, patting her hair back down as she goes. Ruthers or no Ruthers, she has a job to do.

She’s seen Kuryakin’s picture, of course, back in the van when Ruthers was briefing her on the assignment. But it was a poorly lit, poorly composed thing, all leached grays and blurred shoulders; a young man caught in motion, turning away from the camera and merely reduced to a number of base traits: light hair, light skin, light eyes. She raps against the door impatiently, and when he whips it open she stands there blinking at him.

“You’re Kuryakin?”

“Illya Nickovetch,” He says, in a voice that is less Russian-sounding than everything-else-sounding. “What of it?”

He’s roughly her height, roughly her coloring, all skinny limbs and rebellious floppy hair. If Marion were a smidge less vain she might call him roughly as handsome as herself as well. As it stands, she contents herself with admitting that his photograph does him very little justice, and the live thing is indeed quite a picture.

“What of it?" she mimics back at him, voice rising and pointed. "Is that how you always answer your door? It’s a wonder you’ve survived this long. Marion Raven, UNCLE New York,” she introduces herself in half a breath, not waiting for a response. She barges through the doorway, hands on her hips and scowling at her cakewalk of an assignment.

Her cakewalk of an assignment blinks owlishly back and glides out of her way as she stomps into the apartment. “Ah. You must be my esteemed.... protection detail. Wonderful.” The sarcasm dripping from his voice indicates it’s anything but.

“Oh, don’t be such a bore,” she says back before she can stop herself. The ink is still wet from her last formal review, and Mr. Waverly’s words echo uncomfortably in her skull: “You are impulsive and overly reactive at the wrong times, Ms. Raven. Work on that.” Luckily Ruthers took all the listening devices with him when he left. This assignment is just between her and Kuryakin, and she doesn’t think him the type to complain.

He shrugs, and she takes this as a firm acceptance of her presence in his life. She locks the door behind her and makes herself comfortable on his sofa. For a couple of Soviet diplomat’s and their kid, it’s surprisingly lavish pad. The kitchen is admittedly small, but she doubts they’ve cooked in it once on their whirlwind tour; doubtless they’ve been taken out to sup every night. There’s a lofted bedroom and a master tucked behind the living room, a decadent-looking armchair, and a still-spinning record player, its album no where in sight. She frowns at that until she sees the window overlooking the street below, its blinds drawn wide. Her cakewalk assignment had a front row seat to her temper tantrum earlier and no doubt had plenty of time to take off his record and prepare for her knock. Ruthers would be laughing had he been here, and Marion’s face heats up at the thought of her not-so-private escapades on display.

“Oh sit down, will you!” she says before her mouth can say anything else instead. “If we’re stuck with one another we might as well be comfortable.”

His mouth twists into a frown that is, impossibly, improbably, attractive. “I don’t need protecting.”

“Doubtless you don’t. I don’t need this assignment, either. A true waste of time, yes? And yet here we are. Do you play checkers?”

“Checkers?”

“Yes, do you play?”

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to play with you.” He stays standing with his arms crossed, haunting the space between the kitchenette and the living room, somehow not hovering but looking lost in the rented space.

Her face heats up again. “You are a rotten young man, you know that?”

Oddly enough, this shakes a laugh out of him. Dressed all in black with such pale features he strikes a macabre sort of figure. Something Poe perhaps. Certainly something poetic. “Rotten?”

“As an apple. Now will you sit? You’re making me nervous.”

This makes him laugh again, but thankfully he sits. Not on the sofa next to her, of course, but on the overstuffed armchair that is across the coffee table. He keeps his arms crossed the whole while, looking like a scarecrow asked to tea. For a pretty young man he is certainly dour. As if being here on a Friday night were her choice, either.

“I’m sure I’m alright without you here. You can leave, if you want.”

“Oh, I’m sure that would go over great! Lady agent on loan to the New York office abandons her mission to party on a Friday night. I can see the headlines now.”

She catches him rolling his eyes. It’s a refreshing change from his imitation of a statue. “It is pointless. I am in no danger.”

“As if that would work on me. Relax. Pretend you’re part of the furniture if you think it’d help. Since you refuse to play checkers why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

He shrugs. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” The sofa is divinely comfortable. She expected it to be rock solid and symbolic of Soviet anti-hedonist ways, but as she slinks against it she feels her shoulders relax despite herself. It’s certainly better than being cooped up with Ruthers in that godforsaken van, waiting to be shot at.

“Truly. I make music. Sometimes. That is all I do and all I have ever been allowed to do.”

It’s probably the language. Despite his fluency, there’s a level of formality that is awkward about his speech. She builds a picture in her mind of a boy raised on diplomatic lectures to teach him English. “Allowed?” He probably learned a dozen national anthems in their native tongues before his ABCs.

He shrugs again; she’s beginning to associate the motion more with his deflection than anything else, a strange holding pattern of communication that probably says more than he means it to. Hardly the mark of a diplomatic prodigy. She can see why his parents left him behind for the night, despite his clearly being over the age of majority.

“I have a heart condition; I was taken out of school as a child and sent to live with my aunt and uncle. They honored their agreement with my late parents and have continued to provide for me.”

The picture of his childhood falters just a little. Not the son of diplomats but the nephew taken on as an obligation. The possibly unwanted nephew with a dodgy heart.

His stare hardens. “Yes, that was what they thought, too.”

“What?”

“That I am helpless. Fragile.”

“Look at me, won’t you?” She hasn’t realized she’s puffed out her chest until she sees him blush. It’s endearing. He may be pretty, but she’s hardly foolish enough to fall in love with her assignments. “I’m the last person that would think that!” Her blood starts to heat. “You’re insufferable.”

He says something back, something in Russian.

There’s a knock at the door. It startles both of them, but Marion more so. She’s an UNCLE agent. She should have heard the footsteps.

“Go into the kitchen,” she says. He rises out of the overstuffed chair like a wraith and sulks peevishly behind the beaded curtain, as if that would offer him the protection she intended. “The wall, you dolt!”

There’s no peephole. A foolhardy design, to be sure. She can’t imagine what his aunt and uncle were thinking to rent a place like this if they thought they were in danger. The windows alone offer nothing but vulnerable points, and she was foolish enough to leave the street-facing window with its drapes open.

“Who is it?”

“Delivery,” a man’s voice calls back. She looks to Kuryakin who only shrugs once more, that holding pattern of indifference taking root.

“Fine,” she says. Before she opens the door she unclasps her sweater and makes sure her pistol, held close to her body in a custom shoulder holster designed to fit under women’s garments, is within reach. She feels Kuryakin’s eyes on her back, but when she turns to tell him to keep out of sight he’s somehow behind the counter again. He truly is insufferable.

She cracks the door open to see a man in a delivery uniform holding a wrapped gift. A cakewalk, Ruthers said. According to him, her purpose here is mostly diplomatic, mostly to appease the Soviets and prove that there is no ill will. But that is no excuse for sloppy work.

“It’s for a Mr. Cure-akin,” the delivery man says, with all the delicacy of a tuba.

“That’s fine. I’ll take it,” she says as she snaps his picture covertly and shoos him on his way.

She holds the box, wrapped in the gold gilt of her personal favorite chocolatier, away from her body, per protocol. “From Ronald, it says. Who is that?”

“A boy I see sometimes when I’m in town, that’s all.”

Marion quirks her head up at the reply, but her charge meets her gaze impassively. No shame there, but no gloating either. It’s refreshing.

“You must be lucky,” she says after a rudimentary inspection of the box. Nothing looks out of place: no wires, the wrapping is intact, and it smells sickly sweet. “The boys I see sometimes only send me bullets.”

This gets a soft laugh out of him, different from the half-manic laugh earlier, and he leans on his elbows across the kitchen countertop, peering into the living room where she has the box splayed out on the coffee table. Perhaps he’s finally starting to loosen up.

“I think it’s alright,” she says after carefully unwrapping the box from its tinsel paper, and he floats up out of the kitchen towards the chocolate, and by proximity, her. He stops just before the coffee table, not that Marion should be surprised; he hasn’t come within two feet of her all night.

Kuryakin starts to talk, starts to put a record on the turntable, and then the world shifts, kaleidoscopes, explodes in a putrid smell and a terrifying notion of wrongness. Marion has the presence of mind to kick the box of chocolates off the coffee table, but not the coordination, and all she manages to do is fall off the sofa onto the floor, the feeling of bile rising up in her chest as she lands face down on the carpet.

She can’t see Kuryakin. She can, however, reach for her gun. The last thing she remembers is getting a shot off through the still uncovered street-facing window, shattering the glass and sending a wave of cold March air through the room.  

\--

Marion wakes vomiting. She’s in a cell somewhere, makeshift. She’s been in enough of them to know, just by the smell in the air, that it’s a THRUSH operation. She scoots on her hands and knees as far away from the sick as the room allows, and collects herself in the corner.

She’s alive. Her limbs are attached. She can think. There’s a lingering feeling of wrongness still pulsing through her veins, but it’s abeting. Once her mind clears and she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, she sees Kuryakin laid flat on his back in the corner of the cell a few feet away.

She’s next to him in a heartbeat, shoving against his shoulder with all her weight and rolling him onto his side lest he wake like she did and choke to death. She taps his face and wrists and rouses him slightly, but he’s worryingly feeble. She coaxes him to sit up and rest his back against the cell wall.

“Kuryakin?”

He mutters in Russian, soft stuttering consonants that mean nothing to her. His skin is cold and clammy, and her heart skips a beat as she presses a hand to his chest to find his own skipping more than one. His heart flutters through his shirt and into her fingertips, staccato and irregular and far too fast.

She tips him forward until he rests against her shoulder, and she rubs his back and tries to slow his breathing by giving her own measured breaths as examples, but there’s not much she can do. She’s not a doctor. She has only the most basic first aid training as required by her UNCLE field certification; nursing has never interested her in the slightest, and she doesn't care enough about UNCLE to suck up and take extra courses.

Her hand is still snug against his chest a minute and a half later, and she feels his heart stutter towards a normal rythm. She breathes a sigh of relief as he seems to come back to himself. Losing her cakewalk assignment in a dirty cell, half covered in her own sick, is not how she wants this Friday to end.

“Where are we?” He sounds alive enough that she pulls herself away from him and settles her own back against the wall until they are nearly shoulder to shoulder. Unsurprisingly, he shies away and puts a little more space between them. He’s such a odd young man.

“Kidnapped.”

He rolls his eyes and looks unbelievably young. Convinced he won’t suddenly die on her, Marion turns her concentration towards figuring a way out of their situation. It’s not a cell exactly, not how she thought at first. They’re in a basement somewhere, locked in what was once a storage room of some sort, the space now simply a convenient place to stash innocents and UNCLE agents. The shelves are bare, but there’s the hint mold punctuating the air in place of whatever produce once occupied the room. An old restaurant perhaps? Marion gets to her feet and tries the door. There’s no give.

“I shot the window out in your apartment,” she says after trying the door twice more. “Someone will notice that. Help will be on the way.”

Kuryakin stays seated as Marion crawls around on her knees looking for loose tiles, making her feel half on display. He watches her with too-calm eyes. “From whom? I doubt, Ms. Raven, that they will be able to trace a simple broken window to--”

There’s a clack.

“Hush!” she says suddenly, cutting him off his pessimistic tirade. To his credit he quiets immediately, hands going flat against the concrete and ready to move should she order it. Marion presses her ear to the door.

A voice, masculine, echoes through the door.

"Hey now, hold on just a minute. I'm a real estate agent!"

Then another voice, angrier yet, "Shut up," and the door opens. Marion squeezes into the space next to the door, prepared to take their captors by surprise, but she's suddenly got an armful of a strange man, and before she can dump him onto the floor and make a move, the door is closed again.

"Drat!" she says, and sluffs the man, who all but landed with his face between her breasts, onto the floor.

"What on earth..."

Kuryakin is up off the floor and at her side, touching her for the first time and putting a hand protectively at her elbow. It's almost sweet, except that she can still feel his hand shaking from whatever episode he just had. He's more likely to slow her down, but it is, she admits, sweet of him.

"Who the devil are you people?" The man, on his arse and looking up at them with wide brown eyes, seems just as out of place as they are. He's certainly dressed like a real estate agent, with the seams of his pants pressed firmly and his collar starched.

"Marion Raven," she says firmly, and extends a hand. You can tell a lot from a man's handshake. It's something Cutter taught at Survival School, and something she took to heart. She meets a lot of strange men in her profession, and it pays to have as much information about them from the get-go as possible. And if she gets a read on them before they do her, well it's no skin off her back, or whatever the American expression is that Ruthers keeps saying.

He takes it, gently, and twists it into a kiss on the back of her knuckles. The cad. She smiles, still. "Napoleon Solo. I'm representing the sale of this building. Had I known it included such a lovely pair I would have upped the asking price."

Behind her Illya scoffs, and the Solo character turns and sees him for the first time. If anything his smile widens, and Marion finds herself once again rolling her eyes. He truly is a cad, and the opportunistic sort.

"And you are..."

Kuryakin crosses his arms. "Part of the furniture."

Marion grins at. "Are you truly a real estate agent, Mr. Solo?" she asks. "Because I have to tell you, that's not going to do us much good. Should you feel the urge to lift up the corner of your cover and maybe admit you are CIA, I would find that much more helpful."

"Ah... CIA?" He sounds genuinely flabbergasted. He's either a good actor, or as useless as he purports, and neither make her comfortable. "Just what is going on here?"

Kuryakin sighs. "It would appear he is a buffoon."

"I beg pardon!"

"The situation, as such, Mr. Solo," Marion says forcefully, "is that we're guests of undesirables and we wish not to be. So unless you have any ideas about getting us out of here, perhaps you could simply sit in the corner and follow Mr. Kuryakin's example: pretend to be a stone."

Solo quiets, flicks his eyes between Marion and Illya, and then meaningfully over to a crate covered wall. "I'm not CIA. I really am just a real estate agent - abet a very good one - but I might have an idea to get us out anyway."

Marion, exasperated, motions him onward.

"See, this place is listed as partially condemned. There are passageways leading from room to room from the old jazz and prohibition days, but they were built without proper supports, and as the building's aged, the bar owner didn't have the funds to shore them up. And so it fell back to the bank. A bear to sell, they said, so they gave it to me." He winks, and Marion wishes she could deck him, but unfortunately he appears to be useful.

"And there is one of these... passageways... in this room?" Kuryakin sounds out of breath again, and Marion frowns. It won't do for him to have another attack, not when there's actually hope of them making it out of here without Ruthers having to come in and steal all the glory.

"I believe so. From what I remember of the blueprints, there should be a passageway behind that crate there. Plastered over, but I bet we can get in there..." Before he finishes the sentence Marion is to the wall, pulling away empty crates with abandon. She hears Solo say behind her and to the side, "Say, are you alright?"

The last of the crates is pulled away, and true to Solo's prediction, an uneven bit of plaster forms an imperfect rectangle snug to the corner. It’s half the size of an average door, coming up only to her chest, but it’s wide enough they shouldn’t have trouble getting through. She's digging her fingers into it, pulling away chunks of cheap drywall, when she hears a scuffle and then an, “oh!” behind her.

She turns around just in time to see Illya sag against the wall, one hand stretched out to balance himself and the other tangled in his shirt collar. His lips are pale, almost as pale as Solo’s face as he reaches out for Illya in an instinct she’s unused to seeing in men, real estate agents or otherwise.

“Hey, what’s wrong--”

Kuyrakin locks those bright eyes of his on Solo’s face, shudders and pulls in several too-fast breaths, and faints. He would have slipped right to the floor, but Solo was already halfway to him when he started to wilt. By the time Marion has the drywall dropped and jumps to catch him, he’s already cradled against Napoleon’s chest. The man sags a little under the unexpected weight and looks at her with terrified eyes as he tries to keep the lolling head and shoulders upright

"He has a heart condition," she says, and brushes her hands free of drywall dust to close the distance between them. He looks about as bad as last time, pasty and semi-conscious. She doesn't think she likes him any better like this, arms dangling instead of tightly wrapped around his chest. "I think it's whatever they drugged us with that's affecting him, but it could very well be the excitement, too, for all I know."

She reaches a finger to his throat to feel for a pulse. It beats wildly against her skin. She can’t help but notice Solo pull him tighter against his chest, a frown marring his forehead.  

"What do you mean, 'for all you know'? He's your husband, isn't he?" Solo shifts his grip around Illya's middle and starts to lower him to the ground.

She glares at him. “Not on your life; I only just met the man! I'm meant to be keeping him safe, not wooing him."

He starts to wake just as they get him settled down on the floor, and Solo pushes his head between his knees even as he's blinking and starting to push their hands away. "Now just sit like that," he's saying to Illya, softly, like he's done this before. Maybe real estate agents are forever being captured by THRUSH in the United States and coming to the rescue of diplomat's wards, how would she know. "Are you alright? Can you breathe?" He's knelt down at Kuryakin's side and has a hand on his back, right between his shoulder blades. Marion waits for him to shake it off and put the same distance between the two of them she's come to expect with her own interactions with the young man, but curiously he doesn't. Even as he comes back to himself he lets the hand stay.

Kuryakin nods and his hair shakes. "Of course I'm alright. I'm always alright. It will pass, it's only--"

"Shhh," Solo commands, and shockingly Illya hushes, although he does manage a ferocious glare. Solo pays it no mind and continues right on. "I propose we stop talking and get out of here, what do you say, Ms. Raven?"

"Most certainly," she whips back. "If you wouldn't mind leading the way since you apparently know so much about our situation..."

There's a small chance, an outside bet her father would call it, that Solo is a plant. She entertains that thought for a long moment while he pulls the remaining drywall out from the wall and sticks his head into the rectangular void he unearths. But then, when he comes back to the room and helps Kuryakin to his feet she abolishes the thought completely. No plant would be quite so kind to their hostage as Solo is to Illya, not with the way he leans towards him, keeps a hand on him to make sure he's steady. She sidles up to his other side and together they help him over the threshold and into the black.

"Just how certain of this are you, Solo?" She pulls the crates backwards until they stop up the hole they've made, and the blackness of the passageway becomes absolute. She takes a moment to collect herself, and she can feel Illya tense as soon as the last crate slides into place.

He can't meet her eyes, not in the dark, but she can feel him looking in her direction regardless. “Even if this doesn't take us outside, at least we'll lead them on a merry chase."

Illya snorts.

"And you," Solo says lightly, "concentrate on breathing and not keeling over. You're not light, you know."

She scoffs. "He's as skinny as a bean!"

"A heavy bean!"

"I am not!"  His voice is strong and steady, and the indignation entirely genuine. It’s mildly fascinating, this change in him. He was so frustratingly closed-off, but something about either their situation or the addition of Solo’s peculiar personality to the mix has him acting more like a young man and less an automaton.

"Hush you two," she says abruptly. They've gone maybe thirty feet into the passageway, managing their course by Marion keeping a palm outstretched to the wall and, presumably, Solo doing the same, keeping Illya pinned between them, a fact he's more than happy to vocalize his displeasure at.

There's a creak followed by a patter of footsteps above them, and she holds her breath. She can hear her heartbeat thudding in her throat. At least she hopes it's her heartbeat, heaven forbid it’s Illya’s again. She reaches out to him and is glad to find him firm under her hand. The footsteps pause, shuffle, and then walk away. It's disconcerting in the pitch. She wishes she had a compass, a lighter, anything to give her a bit of a sense of direction. More than that she wishes she didn't have to hope her read on Napoleon Solo's handshake was correct and that he wasn't leading them into a trap or a dead end.

Kuryakin's voice is dark. "If we can hear them, they can hear us."

"Most likely. Let's move quickly."

They're quiet for a while, each concentrate on not stepping on the other's toes, literally, and keeping balance in the uneven footing of the tunnel. Marion's fingertips are growing numb from being dragged along the rough walls, but she can't bring herself to let go. She can hear both of the boys breathing, deep and concentrated, and she wonders, in that paranoid fashion her father tried to train out of her, if this is how she'll die: suffocated in a condemned building with two men she hardly knows. They'll find her corpse years from now and say, 'That Marion Raven, she never did know what she was doing with her life.'

Dark tunnels and confined spaces with strangers are, apparently, an appropriate place to have an existential crisis, and Marion's comes upon her without hesitation.

"I'm going to quit."

"Shh!"

She pitches her voice until it's nothing more than a breathy whisper against Illya's arm. "I am, though. I don't know what I was thinking, enrolling in the UNCLE program. I wanted an adventure, I suppose, and I'm more than qualified. But it's been a nightmare. None of the other agents respect me--"

"I respect you," Solo says, apparently affronted on behalf of all men.

"You're not an agent, are you?"

"Well, no..."

"Then hush and let me finish." She catches her voice rising despite herself and tamps it back down, just in time to nearly trip on a loose nail. Kuraykin is the one who catches her and bolsters her until she finds her feet again. "I thought the organization was ready for me, ready for someone who wasn't the calm and collected sort of agent. I thought I was ready to be looked down upon for being... well. For being me! I was wrong!"

"Sometimes unpleasant situations must be born--"

"And you, Mr. Kuryakin, shush! I was saddled with you, and it's not been a particularly fun _situation_ , and frankly I don't wish to bear it any longer."

"Saddled with me! I was saddled with _you_! My aunt and uncle would rather I disappear completely, I have no idea why they assigned me a protection detail..."

Suddenly there's a shift in movement and a rustle of expensive clothes, and Solo, who was off to the side and beyond her reach, has a hand reached up and clamped over her mouth. She's tempted to bite him, but that would certainly elicit the attention of their THRUSH friends. She hears a muffled whumph and is at least given the satisfaction that he's muzzled Illya the same way.

"You listen to me, both of you,” he says in a harsh whisper. “You can all quit your jobs for all I care. Hell, I might quit mine too. It's not exactly the dream career, if you know what I mean. But no one is quitting anything unless we get out of here _alive_."

Marion sits down abruptly, which forces Kuryakin, still holding onto her, to sit down too, and Solo to follow if he wants to keep his hold on their mouthes. She spits and he pulls his hand away, cursing.

"Illya. Say that one more time."

"Were you not listening?"

"Say what you just said again! That your family would rather you be gone--"

He breathes deep and slow. They're so close she can taste his breath, the three of them piled together like dogs in the dark. "My aunt and uncle do not enjoy my presence in their lives. I was meant to go to a military school once I turned twelve, but my heart prevented me from it. I am a burden they feel forced to keep, and although they do not wish me with them, neither do they want me on my own as I am privy to more of their secrets than they wish. They are incorrectly concerned, due to my multinational upbringing, that I might not feel the same loyalty to home they do."  

It’s more words than she’s heard him say all night, and they come pouring out of him quickly. Still in that considered tone she’s associating with his use of English as a second or third language, but so flat that she doesn’t once doubt the truth of them.

Marion takes a deep breath and tries to calm her mind. An uneasy task that bears uneasy results. "Do you think they would try and kill you to solve that problem?"

Solo, who'd been blessedly quiet during their hushed exchange, goes completely still in their cramped little seating arrangement. "Just who are you people?"

"They... might," Kuryakin admits.

"Christ," Solo whispers.

"The chocolates.” Ruthers’ words from earlier today echo back at her, uncomfortable and sour. “Ruthers told me to eat chocolate with you, right before he dropped me off at your apartment. Those damned drugged things, he was behind them, behind all of this," Marion says, her voice shaking a bit more than she'd like to admit. "My current partner was in cahoots with your guardians, and set me up to take the fall. No," she stops herself. "Not for the fall. To take me out as well.” She has to stop to take a breath. She can’t decide if she’s more angry, more afraid, or more resigned. All three emotions take equal turns lapping at her mind and threatening to pull her under. “You, Mr. Solo, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

In the dark the silence is suffocating. Or perhaps that's the air turning sour and killing them slowly. Marion isn't sure and she isn't sure she cares, either. Dying in here with these men is probably better than her future right now. She can't go back to UNCLE, not knowing that Ruthers has it in for her. And as decent a man as Waverly is, she's not sure she can convince him of the truth of the situation, not with her track record and not with the circumstantial evidence they have at their disposal. She's not sure she wants to try. Her father, bless his adventuresome soul, drowned two years ago in the Atlantic. There is no convenient home to run to; UNCLE was an uncomfortable home these last two years, and it’s the only one she has.

And Kuryakin can't go home either. She can't even send him to the Embassy and let the Russians deal with him. His guardians practically _are_ the embassy, and that would be as good as leaving him here.

They're stuck, and not just in this damned passageway.

She can feel it sink into Kuryakin, just from the way his body tightens. "And what do you intend to do about this knowledge, Ms. Marion Raven?"

She slaps him. "Illya Kuraykin, just who do you think I am? Do you really think I’d bump you off? Or leave you here? Did you not hear what I said about UNCLE, too?” The dark is crushing and she can hear both their breathing, but she wishes nothing more than to see Illya’s face. “We’re in this together, you and I, and I think you’d best remember that.”

Solo clears his throat. “Ah, count me in, too.”

“What?” She and Kuryakin say it in unison, and Solo immediately hushes them afterwards.

“I mean it. You two are going to run, right?”

She huffs and sticks out her chin, a movement so intrinsic she doesn’t realize until after that there’s no point, that neither men can see her do it. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe poor Illya will just go back to Russia and I’ll--”

“I don’t think--” Illya starts, but Solo cuts him off quickly.

“No perhaps about it. Unless you intend to take on diplomats with immunity and a corrupt secret spy organization, it seems the most logical option. You can’t tell me you _want_ to go back, either of you? To a family that hates you and to an organization that would sell you out? Let’s be honest about the situation: you two need me.”

“Pardon--”

“Excuse me? You’re positively mad!” Marion is distantly pleased that Illya sounds about as disgruntled at Solo’s intrusion into their personal crisis as she is. The man is a cad as well as a meddler, and an unhelpful one, at that.

“I’m perfectly serious! You have no money, nowhere to go, you need someone on your side. After all, who got you out of here?”

“No one, as of yet!” she spits out, almost too loud. For all she knows Solo has led them in a circle, after all. He’s hardly deserving of his ego.  

But then Solo laughs, soft and controlled, but the sort of laugh she hasn’t heard in a while. Certainly no one laughs like that in UNCLE, at least not that she is aware of. “Well let’s fix that, why don’t we. We can come up with a plan as we go.”

Maybe it’s the dark, maybe it’s the loss of air that’s addled her mind and is making her punch happy, but stuck between the wall of a passageway designed to hide people from the law and these two men, Marion thinks that maybe this isn’t a bad thing at all. That maybe for once, this is exactly how things are supposed to go. She’s made a number of poor decisions in her life, and logic would say this is probably the biggest poor decision yet, but there’s a thrill of something deep in Marion’s gut, under the fear and worry. It flutters against her ribs, like a heartbeat, and she smiles.

Miraculously, after an unmeasured period of time spent stumbling through the dark and leaning against one another hoping they won’t die from THRUSH, from suffocation, from some collapse of the unshored tunnel itself, the passageway actually opens out into the alley behind the building. They stand there, in the open, smelling of dust and grime and plaster and (in Marion’s case) sick, and look at one another for the first time out of captivity.

Marion stares for at them for while. Her two perfect strangers. They’re both mesmerizing, even dirty and haggard as they are. In fresh air Illya seems healthy as a horse, and Solo is grinning like a loon, white teeth and bright eyes that are infectious. She throws herself across both of them and pulls them into a tremendous hug that, shockingly, both men return, even her morose Russian.

It’s raining, which is somehow fitting. The moon is high, and Marion’s internal clock figures the time to be somewhere between midnight and two o’clock. “They’ll notice we’re gone soon,” she says calmly. She feels complete, suddenly, although it makes no sense at all for her to feel that way, soaked in cold rain and still linked arm in arm with two perfect strangers, civilians at that. Although she supposes she’s a civilian too now, or is in as much of the sense that counts.

Solo grins, and it’s a nice to see it on his face after so long in the blasted dark. “Shall we run? I told you I was very good at my job. I have a private boat. We could go anywhere we wanted.”

“And what is in it for you, Mr. Solo?” Kuryakin asks, eyes half shuttered and suspicious. Like Marion he isn’t shying away from the rain. It splashes off his face, and he hardly so much as blinks. “I know my own reasons for wanting to start fresh and live a life that is my own, but what are yours?”

They really ought not to just stand here in the rain, out in the open like this. But Marion needs to know, too. She’s impulsive. She’s reactive. But unlike what Ruthers and Mr. Waverly think, she’s not a fool. Not entirely anyway, and frankly she doesn’t mind. Maybe being a fool will be fun for a change.

Solo tips his head into the rain. “Nothing, Mr. Kuryakin. May I call you Illya?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’m just tired of living my life doing what I’m supposed to do. When my wife died I went to college. I took a sensible job. I have a sensible home with a sensible car. And every night I come home and read a sensible book. It’s like something went wrong. I don’t think this is who I’m supposed to be, and I think I just never realized it until now. Have you ever had a realization come on you like that?”

Marion shudders, a chill running down her spine.  

He stops, as if realizing just how much he’s said. It’s a little strange to hear his voice fully and not masked in a whisper. Marion thinks she likes listening to him talk, even if he is a cad and a buffoon. “I may not be running from murdering uncles, of either sort, but that doesn’t mean I want to stay here and be a real estate agent tomorrow and wake up in my sensible bed. Alone.”

“I’ve always fancied Canada.”

“It’s a lovely place.”

“We could set up shop as private eyes. The three of us.”

“You are both mad.”

“But you’re coming with us, right? I would feel just awful if you stayed behind and got your throat slit.”

“And I’d feel awful if either of you did, so let’s get along.”

“Very well. _Kuryakin, Raven, and Solo - private investigators_. It does have a certain ring." Illya's arms are uncrossed. For the first time she's seen him, he looks relaxed. Hopeful, maybe, is the word she's looking for.

Napoleon's face scrunches up. "It sounds awful. And not very clandestine. We're meant to be in hiding, remember?"

Marion laughs. "Do you know, I don't think I mind?" She laughs again, the full bodied kind that she couldn't get away with between UNCLE walls, not as a woman. "Running away that is. Come along my boys," she says, and takes each of them by an arm until the three of them create a sorry looking line. "Let's be free."


End file.
